Tracking the evolution of language

[snopes]

Researchers discover that irregular verbs change in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,2553948.story

[rogue74656]

I read this book last year:

http://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Lang...041749-8833449

and while it described the process of modificaton of verb forms (with many examples including, I believe, sneak) it did not give a statistical analysis indicating exact rate of change...

It is a very good read, however!

-rogue

[Steve]

Sally Thomason at Language Log responded to the Fitch article in two posts:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...5021.html#more


http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...5023.html#more

I haven't read the article in Nature, so I'm not sure how fair her criticism is.

[BamaRainbow]

The only problem I see with the LA Times article (other than the line about the Canterbury Tales being from around 1200, which was corrected in a "sidebar") is that Anglo-Saxon (aka "Old English") has far more in common with Modern German in terms of irregular verbs than it does with Modern English. Have these linguistic experts checked whether or not Modern German irregular verbs have simplified? (Heck, one could say there's been even less simplification since there's far more conjugation involved.) As far as I can tell, the only REAL simplification that's occurred in modern language is the extinction of the future and future perfect subjunctive forms (Portuguese, interestingly enough, is the only modern European language which still regularly includes these forms in grammar texts, although the texts note that the forms are almost never encountered in "modern" literature; they seem to exist solely for "academic purposes", even though French and Spanish texts rarely even allude to the historic existence of these forms).
Also, I have to take exception to this comment:

Lead author Erez Lieberman, also a Harvard graduate student, said the answer might lie in the simplicity of the -ed rule, which is far easier to remember than, say, the rule governing the conjugation of "grow" to "grew." (In one-syllable words that begin with two consonants, keep the first two letters and add -ew.)

I can think of several words which fail this -ew "rule": try, fry, cry, thaw. I'm unaware of any instances where "trew", "frew", "crew", or "thew" were ever used. (The rule is supported by words like "slay", "draw", and "fly" which all retain the -ew past form. But, interestingly enough--at least to me--is the fact that "show" which, in the KJV Bible, appears as "shew" in past forms, indicating a much more rapid evolution. One would think that "show" would have been a much more frequently used verb than "fly", since people "show" things all the time, but "fly" applied only to winged animals until the start of the 20th century.)

I'm with BamaRainbow - many conjugations, including the past participle of English verbs, are very difficult to subject to rhyme or reason. I'm currently trying to teach DD to speak it, and explaining why "eated" is wrong, but "ate" is right, or "bited" v. "bit", "sayed" v. "said", "am" v. "was". Many languages have irregular verbs, but English takes (taked? tooked?) the biscuit.

Even if past participles are evolving, they're taking their chuffing time. I think of how Chaucer's "The droughte of Marche had perced to the rote" has evolved into "The drought of March had pierced to the root" and the past participle seems to be the least changed of all.

[llewtrah]

So ... are we talking about the evolution of USAnian English or of British English here? (snuck/sneaked, dove/dived etc) And haven't Victorian grammarians thrown a spanner in the language evolutionary works by trying to make English conform to rules based on Latin grammar? IIRC, USAnian English prefers verbs to be regular and have different methods of turning nouns into verbs (burgle/burglarise).

[Steve]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

So ... are we talking about the evolution of USAnian English or of British English here? (snuck/sneaked, dove/dived etc)

I don't think it would matter. The LA Times article says:

Researchers compiled a list of 177 Old English irregular verbs, 145 of which remained irregular in Middle English and 98 of which remain irregular today.

As far as I know, the differences in past tense between dialects in English aren't usually verbs that were irregular in Old English but have since become regularized in parts of the anglophone world. For example, the two verbs you mentioned above have become irregular over time and thus wouldn't be a part of this study.

And haven't Victorian grammarians thrown a spanner in the language evolutionary works by trying to make English conform to rules based on Latin grammar?

I don't see why. I don't know of any attempts to regularize verbs. And those attempts to get rid of split infinitives and so forth had some affect on formal written English, but very little on the spoken language.

[Tarquin Farquart]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

IIRC, USAnian English prefers verbs to be regular and have different methods of turning nouns into verbs (burgle/burglarise).

But without those rules, we wouldn't have song titles like I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Steve

I don't see why. I don't know of any attempts to regularize verbs. And those attempts to get rid of split infinitives and so forth had some affect on formal written English, but very little on the spoken language.

Errr... as a result of school penalising us for breaking those rules, it has certainly affected the spoken English of many of us. Perhaps there's a class and culture difference. At Grammar School woe betide any pupil that split an infinitive or ended a sentence with a preposition - even in conversations overheard by teachers! My parents had the same treatment at school.

[Steve]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

Errr... as a result of school penalising us for breaking those rules, it has certainly affected the spoken English of many of us. Perhaps there's a class and culture difference. At Grammar School woe betide any pupil that split an infinitive or ended a sentence with a preposition - even in conversations overheard by teachers! My parents had the same treatment at school.

Ah, I didn't know rules like that were enforced in conversations.

Even so, the fact that after all this time they still need to be enforced shows that such rules haven't affected the evolution of language much. After all, teachers don't have to chide us every time we use "holp" as the past tense of "help".

[Tarquin Farquart]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

Errr... as a result of school penalising us for breaking those rules, it has certainly affected the spoken English of many of us. Perhaps there's a class and culture difference. At Grammar School woe betide any pupil that split an infinitive or ended a sentence with a preposition - even in conversations overheard by teachers! My parents had the same treatment at school.

They ain't called Grammar schools for nothing!

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Steve

Ah, I didn't know rules like that were enforced in conversations.

Even so, the fact that after all this time they still need to be enforced shows that such rules haven't affected the evolution of language much. After all, teachers don't have to chide us every time we use "holp" as the past tense of "help".

After years of enforcement, I now instinctively try to use sentences that endeth not with a preposition and I feel guilty/bad if I break that "rule" (the sort of "whoops, shouldn't have said that" feeling the moment I've used a split infinitive or terminal preposition). Because my parents had the same treatment at school, they also enforced the grammar rules at home. One result of all of this is very different styles of speak in different echelons of society. Language is a strong indicator of social status.

I also wince when I see/hear "which" being used when the writer/speaker should have used "that" ("which" is used if it starts a clause). I have a habit of using "one" where many would use "I" - this sin't an attempt at social climbing ("one" is often considered an upper class affectation), it's the result of having grammar drummed into us at school.

[snopes]

Languages evolve just as species do, and just as with organisms, the rate of evolution is hardly uniform. Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on.

But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/...nce/17word.php

[Steve]

Originally Posted by rogue74656

I read this book last year:

http://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Lang...041749-8833449

and while it described the process of modificaton of verb forms (with many examples including, I believe, sneak) it did not give a statistical analysis indicating exact rate of change...

It is a very good read, however!

-rogue

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm about halfway through it now. Good stuff. Who knew that "aujourd'hui" came from "on the day of this day"? I'd also recommend John McWhorter's Power of Babel on the subject of language change.

[BamaRainbow]

Originally Posted by snopes

Languages evolve just as species do, and just as with organisms, the rate of evolution is hardly uniform. Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on.

But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/...nce/17word.php

I was under the impression that a "cognate" was a word in one language which derived from another language but retains some recognizable feature(s) from the original (or earlier) language. The English word "mother", for instance, would be a cognate to the German "Mutter" and the Latin "mater", and the English "father" would be a cognate to the German "Vater" and the Latin "pater".
The example of "bird" as I'd understood would not be a cognate since it's fairly independent of any other Indo-European language (most, if not all, other Germanic languages--including Old English/Anglo-Saxon--use something similar to the Modern German, "Vogel").

[MapleLeaf]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

After years of enforcement, I now instinctively try to use sentences that endeth not with a preposition and I feel guilty/bad if I break that "rule" (the sort of "whoops, shouldn't have said that" feeling the moment I've used a split infinitive or terminal preposition). Because my parents had the same treatment at school, they also enforced the grammar rules at home. One result of all of this is very different styles of speak in different echelons of society. Language is a strong indicator of social status.

I also wince when I see/hear "which" being used when the writer/speaker should have used "that" ("which" is used if it starts a clause). I have a habit of using "one" where many would use "I" - this sin't an attempt at social climbing ("one" is often considered an upper class affectation), it's the result of having grammar drummed into us at school.

I do the same thing. I have an English teacher for a mother. Sometimes, though, I have to finally break free and show that constant grammar correction is not something I will always put up with.

[Furienna]

Originally Posted by BamaRainbow

I was under the impression that a "cognate" was a word in one language which derived from another language but retains some recognizable feature(s) from the original (or earlier) language. The English word "mother", for instance, would be a cognate to the German "Mutter" and the Latin "mater", and the English "father" would be a cognate to the German "Vater" and the Latin "pater".
The example of "bird" as I'd understood would not be a cognate since it's fairly independent of any other Indo-European language (most, if not all, other Germanic languages--including Old English/Anglo-Saxon--use something similar to the Modern German, "Vogel").

English still has a word, "fowl", which would be the cognate of German "Vogel" and Swedish "fågel". I wonder where the English word "bird" comes from...

An interesting example is the word "head", which is related to not only the German word "Haupt" or the Swedish word "huvud", but also (albeit more distant) to the Latin word "caput". Because "c" in the Romance languages often correlates to "h" in the Germanic languages, and "p" in the Romance languages often correlates to "f" or "v" in Germanic languages. So in ancient Germanic, the word for head must have been something like "haput" or "hafut", which evolved into English "head", German "Haupt" and Swedish "huvud". Swedish has a "v" instead of the Latin/Romance "p", while the "p" is still there in German and has disappeared completely in English.

[Floater]

Originally Posted by Furienna

English still has a word, "fowl", which would be the cognate of German "Vogel" and Swedish "fågel". I wonder where the English word "bird" comes from...

From Merriam-Webster online:

Etymology: Middle English brid, bird, from Old English bridd
Date: before 12th century

archaic : the young of a feathered vertebrate

But I cant think of a corresponding Swedish word.

[Furienna]

No, I can't either.

[kern]

Originally Posted by Steve

Even so, the fact that after all this time they still need to be enforced shows that such rules haven't affected the evolution of language much. After all, teachers don't have to chide us every time we use "holp" as the past tense of "help".

It's more that the stigmatization of older forms surviving in dialect has spurred wider use of more modern forms. For instance, "had drank" was once standard but is now dialectical. "climb" has a number of dialectical forms surviving from older language such as "clomb" and "clumb". (I find it typical of usage writers that older forms are here criticized as wrong, whereas in other cases the older form is preferred to the innovation.)

llewtrah:

I also wince when I see/hear "which" being used when the writer/speaker should have used "that" ("which" is used if it starts a clause).

What you're probably referring to is using "which" for non-restrictive relative clauses and "that" for restrictive; this so-called "rule" is really little more than wishful thinking on the usage writers' parts since "which" is very frequently used, even in formal edited prose, in non-restrictive relative clauses.